Sponsors (2)
Introduced January 7, 2025 by Marie Gluesenkamp Perez · Last progress January 7, 2025
The bill empowers a fast-start Select Committee with resources to study and recommend major election reforms—potentially increasing voter choice and legal clarity nationwide—but risks federal-state conflict, concentrated investigatory power, short-term costs, and voter confusion if changes proceed without broad deliberation and public transition planning.
Voters (nationwide) could gain more meaningful choice and fairer representation if Congress studies and moves toward voting systems like ranked-choice or proportional representation that better translate votes into seats.
State and local election officials would get clearer guidance about constitutional authority and legal barriers, which could enable more uniform federal standards or safer experimentation and reduce state-by-state confusion.
The Select Committee can begin work quickly and with full committee-like resources (early meetings, standing-committee protections, access to House staff and interim funding), enabling prompt evidence-gathering and reporting to Congress.
Voters (especially ordinary voters and middle-class families) could experience short-term confusion and disruption if election system changes are pursued or implemented without broad public education and transition planning.
States and localities could lose control or face federal intrusion over how Representatives are elected, provoking partisan conflict, legal challenges, and resource-consuming disputes over constitutional authority and oversight.
Allowing the Select Committee to meet or hold hearings with fewer members and on an accelerated schedule may reduce deliberation, limit full-member participation, and undermine the perceived representativeness and legitimacy of its findings.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Creates a House Select Committee to study alternatives to current congressional election methods and report recommendations within one year.
Creates a bipartisan House Select Committee on Electoral Reform to study how U.S. citizens elect Members of Congress and to examine a range of alternative election methods and barriers to state experimentation. The committee must hold hearings, review options such as multi-member districts, proportional representation, ranked-choice and cumulative voting, changes to House size, open primaries, fusion voting, and independent redistricting commissions, then deliver a final report to Congress and the President within one year of its first meeting.